Have You Set Aside Time For Marketing Your Accounting Services Yet?

This is my public service announcement for the day: you absolutely need to schedule a specific amount of time each week for marketing your accounting services. You’re welcome.

You can either run your business (and your life, for that matter) foot-loose and fancy free, happily going about your daily routine, content in knowing that you own a fire extinguisher and love putting out small fires, constantly sniffing the air for smoke, always a little on edge. Or you can buy fire insurance, take little steps that ensure you probably won’t have a fire, hold fire drills, etc.

Yes, the second way might be boring, and yes, no one likes fire drills, but seriously. Grow up.

When I opened my first, my second, my third, and yes, my fourth practice, I made it a religious doctrine to schedule a minimum amount of time each week for marketing. when I was starting each office, I started with zero clients, so I obviously put in more time. But, even after each office started becoming profitable, I made sure that I kept to my minimum schedule. It set the stage, gave me a chance to meet members of the community, and at a more practical level, it brought in a consistent stream of new clients, and allowed me to keep ahead f my client churn.

I think the reason I believe so strongly in setting a minimum amount of time each week for marketing is because I am a social animal, and sitting at a desk making journal entries was anathema to me. That’s where I was lucky to have a “Dearly Beloved” who was such an animal. She did the grunt work necessary to get us past the growth hump each time.

But, I notice that for many accountants, marketing is an afterthought.

Famed management guru, Peter Drucker, famously stated that “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

It’s not as if you didn’t study marketing in school. I’m pretty sure it was a required course at your university. But, I’m also sure that none of what you studied applied to you. I never saw a course on marketing of accounting services, so I can’t blame you if your marketing techniques follow the staid old model preached by the established pro’s in the business. The folks who probably are either well established, or have never had to go out and knock on doors asking for business.

The typical university states that it trains accounting students to be “top level management” at some big firm.

Only thing they fail to disclose is that there are a limited number of big firms, and they are seemingly training an unlimited number of new, young, accountants. Which is why so many of us wind up in public practice. We need a job.

It’s not like there isn’t a dearth of great resources out there to help you get your derrière in gear, but I doubt there is as wide a variety as you will find between wipn and Practice Builder Publishing. We have everything from basic tools and tactics you can jump on and start using tomorrow, to master’s level training that will help you define your practice, define your market, and define your marketing. We have marketing manuals for specific niches, and specific specializations. In fact, on our site, we have only one course that teaches a technical skill, the Asset Based Loan Auditor/Examiner Training Course, and the only reason that is in here is that I was in the field so long, I decided to write about it when I became a freelancer and found out what the fees were like for freelancers.

But I suspect that you probably don’t need more talk about your need to improve your marketing skills, or else you wouldn’t be here.

My Beltane (May Day) Announcement

May Day, May 1 on the calendar, is an ancient spring festival in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s an astronomical holiday, one of the year’s four cross-quarter days, or day that falls more or less midway between an equinox and solstice – in this case the March equinox and June solstice. The other cross-quarter days are Groundhog Day on February 2, Lammas on August 1 and Halloween on October 31. May Day also stems from the Celtic festival of Beltane, which was related to the waxing power of the sun as we move closer to summer. At Beltane, people lit fires through which livestock were driven and around which people danced, moving in the same direction that the sun crosses the sky.

One way May Day is commonly commemorated is by friends dancing around the Maypole, intertwining colorful ribbons.

So, this Beltane, I am lighting a fire (metaphorically speaking, of course) on this here little interweb, and driving the herd of marketing material staight through it and headed for your pa picking Rainmaker’s heart.

I am launching the publishing arm of Instant Practice Builder at Practice Builder Publishing and making all the wonderful tools that were formerly only available to members of the Instant Practice Builder, available to other practitioners on an a la carte menu. Letting you symbolically wind among the offerings and see what you think.

I invite you to poke around here and see what is ready now or soon will be, and try to guess at some of what is in the works. See some of the authors that have contributed, and check out their works. All of the authors, except for me, of course, are either currently in practice, and acknowledged as being at the top of their field, or are educators and specialists in training material development.

Click on the “Home” tab on the menu at the top, and start wandering around. See if some of the training material lights a fire under your marketing heart.

P.S. Think I'm full of B.S.? Maybe you ought to let me know what you think. Plop your comments in the section down below the related articles and let me know what you think.!

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